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'Urban biogeography' is the study of the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time. Maps and data of these urban biotopes might influence property prices, council tax or the cost of your health insurance. Urban biogeography enthusiasts, both amateur and professional, make use of emerging technologies to measure local city-body ecologies. One of the techniques often used is 'sewage monitoring'. This tool allows one to pump up a tiny amount of sewage into the little bottles and scan it for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, all without even having to lift a manhole cover.

The tool uses synthetic biology* to detect oestrogen, anti-biotics, viagra or prozac: modified bacteria-solutions in the bottles change colour when detecting the chemicals or hormones. Since synthetic biology is both open-source and modular, the tool's functionality can be extended by downloading the DNA code for other detectors from a database on the internet.

This is part of the 'My City = My Body' project, a design research project on how the rise of bio-technologies might influence our future interaction with the city. In this part, I used this speculative scenario and fictional application of synthetic biology as a starting point for collaboration and confrontation with the department for Bioengineering at Imperial College in London. Many thanks to James Chappell and Vincent Rouilly at Imperial college for the bioengineering and introducing me to the wonderful world of Synthetic Biology.

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*Synthetic biology is the coming together of biology and engineering, resulting in tools and technologies to design and build biological systems. The blueprints show how to access a database of standard biological parts and get down to DNA code in 3 mouseclicks, in this case of an antibiotics detector for Urban Biogeography. This code can be sent of to be synthesized (printed on a DNA synthesizer) and then be implemented into a bacteria so it will change colour when it detects anti-biotics. Download the blueprints in pdf format. (560KB zip archive)

Urban Biogeography at the RCA show